Long-running state Field Poll shutting down
Well-respected service tracked opinions of California residents for nearly 70 years
SAN FRANCISCO — The Field Poll, which for seven decades has tracked the opinions of Californians, announced Friday it is shutting down in early 2017.
The poll was established in 1947 as the California Poll by Mervin Field, a groundbreaking pollster who died last year at age 94.
“It is with great sadness that I must report to you that our parent company, Havas Advertising, will be closing Field Research next year and all activities related to the Field Poll will cease at that time,” said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director.
The nonpartisan, independent poll has been considered the gold standard of political polls in California for generations. It has produced more than 2,500 telephone polls on presidential races, gubernatorial contests, ballot initiatives and social issues during a tenure that spanned nine gover-
nors — from Earl Warren to the second incarnation of Jerry Brown.
Since 1948, the average difference between the Field Poll’s final pre-election poll in California and the actual percentage vote in California for the winning candidate in races for president, governor and the U.S. Senate has been 2 percentage points.
“This is a great loss for anyone who wants to get unbiased, unvarnished, nonpartisan information about public opinion,” said Larry Gerston, professor emeritus of political science at San Jose State. “The poll has had an outstanding reputation. It has been rated among the highest in the nation.”
Polling has changed in recent years. Newspapers and television stations, which paid to subscribe to the poll to get its results first, have seen declines in revenue because of competition for advertising from internet companies like Google, Facebook and Craigslist, reducing the ability of traditional media outlets to spend as much on polling. Meanwhile, other polling operations have sprung up in California, such as the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit think tank established in 1994 with an endowment from Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Hewlett.
And California has changed. More people have cellphones without landlines. Big companies that once employed polling firms now do the work in-house or with online surveys. And large waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia have meant that Californians speak many more languages, making them harder to poll. In addition, many residents now routinely screen their calls and are no longer as eager to talk to pollsters as they once were, said Gerston, who ran polls for 25 years for his own firm, Gerston & Associates.
“It used to be that 1 out of 3 people would answer. Then 1 out of 10,” he said. “Now it’s fewer than that. People feel increasingly that polling is intrusive. The cost goes up when you have fewer people who answer.”
The poll’s namesake and original director, Field, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was born in New Jersey in 1921. His first encounter with polling was a chance meeting with George Gallup, founder of the Gallup Poll. Intrigued, Field took a survey of fellow students at his school, Princeton High School, in the late 1930s about their preference for class president. Field eventually worked for the Gallup Poll in Princeton, New Jersey.
After attending night school at Rutgers University, as well as spending time at the University of Missouri and in the Merchant Marine in the South Pacific during World War II, Field moved to California and founded his own poll in 1945. It has published regularly since 1947, relying on funding not only from media companies, but also corporations, the University of California and California State University systems, and foundations and nonprofit organizations.
During its height, the Field Research Corp., the San Francisco-based owner of the poll, employed more than 75 people. Its clients included a who’s who of California businesses, including Standard Oil, Pacific Telephone and Bank of America.
In 1988, the KLP Group, a British communications company, bought Field Research. Through mergers over the years, it is now owned by Havas, a French multinational advertising and public relations firm.
DiCamillo, who became the poll’s director in 1993, said: “It marks the end of an era, and it has been a great ride.”